Why our politics generates too much heat and very little light

Beyond the veneer of agitation to get the job done, our politics is largely transactional. [Courtesy]

“We live in a contaminated moral environment,” declared Vaclav Havel the playwright President of the Czech Republic in a thundering speech delivered on New Year in 1989 to his compatriots to mark the end of the Communist hegemony in Europe.

In most of his written works, Havel despised the double life that so pervaded the Communist Party; “people saying one thing in public and another in private.”

One of the abiding memories...